[HN Gopher] One million people saw my dumbest tweet
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       One million people saw my dumbest tweet
        
       Author : chr15m
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2021-05-10 22:07 UTC (53 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mccormick.cx)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mccormick.cx)
        
       | 5- wrote:
       | original tweet (2015):
       | https://twitter.com/neilknet/status/634448062040162304
       | 
       | (absolutely irrelevant to the discussion, but someone had to do
       | this)
        
       | chris_wot wrote:
       | I think I managed to get to the point if not caring when I stated
       | to right about Australian women on Wikipedia. Once I wrote an
       | article about Ellen Atkinson, I realised the content was key, not
       | the games.
       | 
       | I already knew that, of course. I now write under another
       | account. Hopefully I remain anonymous. If I get famous or
       | respected under this account, I'll create a new one where I'm not
       | recognised.
        
       | codeulike wrote:
       | Can someone explain it? How does it relate to the Mandalorian?
        
         | sodality2 wrote:
         | The tweet caption-
         | https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a29888972/the-manda...
        
         | mcphage wrote:
         | "This is the way" was his text for the tweet. It's a repeated
         | line on The Mandalorian.
        
         | mattgreenrocks wrote:
         | "This is the way" is a mantra of the Mandalorians.
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | Super useful observation that the metrics are the addiction.
       | 
       | > Metrics are an addictive drug. Twitter is literally an
       | incremental game.
       | 
       | This comes up in the Nir Eyal "Hooked" model, but Eyal spends
       | chapters outlining it, where the author here captures it as the
       | main thing. Watch the number go up, get little hits of dopamine.
       | It's gambling, trading/investing, SEO, literally anything with an
       | 1/f distribution. (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/1/f_noise)
       | 
       | I'd wonder if you could drive engagement on an app by spacing out
       | the arrival of user alerts and feedback so they only reached the
       | user with a delay/period that was hidden, but detectable in the
       | same sense of anticipation music creates. Seems like an unethical
       | experiment, and probably hidden in the annals of FAANG companies.
        
       | sharkjacobs wrote:
       | Take the social dynamics and mechanisms which have caused class
       | clowns to seek attention from groups since time immemorial, and
       | gamify it with a feedback mechanism which will dole out little
       | hits of dopamine periodically for the rest of the day/week
       | whenever you check the device and the number has gone up
       | 
       | There's nothing profound about addiction but it's no less real
       | and momentous in the life of afflicted for that
        
       | ALittleLight wrote:
       | I used to have a small YouTube channel. Still do, I guess, but
       | don't update it.
       | 
       | One of my videos was very different than all my others and it
       | did, for me, very well. This video earned something like 700k
       | views compared to my average of high hundreds to low thousands.
       | 
       | Like this author, my video was something different than I usually
       | did. Unlike this author my thought was "I've got to start making
       | more content like that new thing!"
       | 
       | However, my approach kind of killed my channel. The reason my
       | video did well turned out to be because a minor YouTuber
       | (significantly more major than me) linked to it and almost all of
       | the views came from him. He never linked to my other videos so
       | when I made similar content it didn't very well.
       | 
       | When I went back to making my old content that did worse than
       | before too. My mental model was that I had alienated my original
       | audience with the shift to the new kind of videos and then
       | alienated my new audience with the return to the old kind of
       | videos.
       | 
       | In the end, I felt that the random spike in views, and my poor
       | handling of it, ruined my channel and reversed the modest
       | momentum I had built over years. I used to have small but growing
       | numbers of views and subscribers. After this incident I had
       | declining numbers of both.
        
       | rubatuga wrote:
       | TLDR: Don't let artificial metrics rule your life.
       | 
       | Chasing Hacker News points is one of them.
        
         | undeadcomment wrote:
         | Imagine caring about HN points instead of the dang metagame.
        
       | bt1a wrote:
       | I, too, might be upset enough to ragequit Twitter if my most
       | popular post was that & I believed my other posts were profound.
        
         | causality0 wrote:
         | You hit the nail on the head. I don't have a good name for it,
         | but this submission falls into one of HN's top ten tropes:
         | Technology/startup blogger stumbles into mild internet fame for
         | a single event/post, and then later feels the need to wax
         | philosophical about it. That'd be fine, except none of them
         | ever have anything original to say about it. Literally all of
         | them boil down to "I didn't really enjoy getting my ten million
         | likes, and social media is bad for me."
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-10 23:01 UTC)